Essays on Trade, Technology, and Banking

Abstract

This dissertation comprises three essays on technology, international trade, and banking. The first two essays investigate industrial robots and their economic impact. In chapter 1, I construct a novel dataset that measures firm-level robot adoption among US manufacturing firms. I summarize a series of stylized facts related to robot-adopting firms in the US, and present descriptive evidence for the relationship between robots and labor market outcomes. I also develop a potential instrumental variable for robot adoption, based on immigrant shocks to the labor supply of robot-complementary workers. In chapter 2, I rely on the constructed dataset to analyze the effect of robot adoption on imports and offshoring, using a mix of theory and empirics. I find that the rise of robots in the US led to an increase in offshoring, both at the firm level and in aggregate. However, the increase in imports and the resulting efficiency gains come at the cost of domestic manufacturing workers, and particularly assembly workers. In chapter 3, coauthored with David Hao Zhang, we turn attention to small businesses in the US and their access to government support distributed through banks, such as the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP). We document geographical and racial disparities in the density of financial institutions across US commuting zones, and show that these disparities translate into differences in take-up of the PPP.